Exploring the human condition in daily bites. An experiment in how to address large, complex issues with a long series of small essays - and in how to make philosophically thorny topics more accessible without distorting them.

Oxford English Dictionary Online doesn't get around to defining dirt as soil until the third definition, preceded by excrement and filth, and followed by foulness, metaphorical foulness, and demeaning phrases.

We despise soil, whether we realize it or not. It is one rung above excrement in our repertory of insults, the baseline of worthlessness.

Yet in the funeral expression "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" survives the ancient recognition of the soil as the source of all life, including our own.

Soil, water, air, and sunlight are the main ingredients seeds need to become the plants that support the animal kingdom. Of these, soil is by far the most complex, the most directly responsible in terms of raw materials for the complexity of plants. Seeds provide the blueprint for the adult plant's complexity, air and water provide most of the bulk elements (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and in the case of a few plants nitrogen), and sunlight the energy, but for most plants (those that do not extract nitrogen from the air and fix it in the soil) the crucial ingredient for building proteins (nitrogen) and for all plants the majority of the elements they need (calcium, silicon, selenium, zinc, and so on) come from the dirt and only from the dirt. When we eat plants, we are eating transformed air, water, sunlight, and dirt. Since animals eat plants or other animals, the same is true when we eat animals.

We are what we eat. Whether through our umbilical cords from our mothers' bloodstreams, through our mothers' milk after birth, or more directly as we grow older, we eat transformed dirt, and we could not exist unless we did. We are circulating systems of muddy water, air, and light, and all of these ingredients flow into us from the world around us, through us, and back out into the world. Our dependence on dirt is complete and continuous. There are few things upon which our lives are so completely dependent.

Loath as we are to recognize our dependence on dirt, its value to us, not surprisingly we do not understand it very well. Dirt is extremely complex and varied, and we are still learning embarrassingly basic things about it.

For example, only recently did we learn that the vast network of fungus in forest soil is not a parasite, that it is essential for the forest to survive. Filaments of fungi, called hyphae, are fungi's equivalent to plant roots. They are much finer and more numerous than roots, and are much much more efficient at extracting water and nutrients from the soil. Plants and fungi team up to survive. Fungi send out their hyphae to actually penetrate the cell walls of plant roots, creating a single system of roots and hyphae. The fungi can then share their water and nutrients with the plants, and the plants share their sugars with the fungi. Most plants cannot thrive, or in many cases even survive, without the fungi to help them work the soil. We only figured this out recently.

Forest soil is packed with hyphae, an unbelievably complex network of tiny tubes. A single teaspoon of forest soil contains 100 miles of hyphae. Think about that. Go get yourself a teaspoon of sugar. Look at it. Then think about how far away 100 miles of hyphae can reach from where you are right now. Then pack all that distance into the teaspoon you have in your hand. All that complexity, all that capacity to absorb and transport water and nutrients, is just a fraction of what is in that teaspoonful of forest soil. The visible complexity of a forest exists only because of the invisible complexity in its soil.

Inoculation of seedlings with hyphae to help them grow is becoming part of forestry management, but is not yet a regular part of other forms of agriculture. Introduction of this practice is recent and still ongoing, because until very recently we had no idea plants need fungi to thrive. We spent decades trying to exterminate fungi, dosing crops, forests, and gardens liberally with fungicides, not realizing that a healthy hyphae network also produces its own specialized fungicides to kill off hostile fungi. We still know little about the many varieties of fungi in the world and their hyphae networks, but at least now we have a hint about the complexity of the soils they inhabit and thereby create.

What other rudimentary but essential information do we not yet know about soil? If we are still tripping over things as basic as this, we must assume there is more we do not yet even suspect.

What we do know is that we are running out of soil. Our agricultural, grazing, forestry, mining, landscaping, and sewage management practices have accelerated soil erosion to incredible levels. Our hopes for the future--artificial intelligence, curing cancer and poverty, traveling to the stars--will prove futile mirages if we run out of fertile soil first, which should happen within the next hundred years at this accelerating pace.

Our current, soil-wasteful practices are extremely profitable, so we are unlikely to change anything, except perhaps to begin selling the little remaining soil to each other at obscene prices when it becomes scarce, and then to go to war with each other over fertile land after that. China, which has aggressively adopted American farming practices, is consequently running out of soil faster than any other country. What do you suppose a billion people will do when they cannot feed themselves from their own land?

If this seems pessimistic, if you imagine technology will offer a magic fix to this problem, consider that soil building is a very slow process, taking many centuries to recreate a deep, fertile soil bed. Moving soil from place to place, though difficult and expensive, is doable with current technology, but creating new soil from scratch is another matter. Any soil we did mix up from more primitive materials would be missing the many things we do not yet realize are necessary for sustainable agriculture, the other things besides hyphae that we do not yet understand.

Meanwhile, the agricultural soil we do have is increasingly contaminated by salts and poisons as side effects of how intensively we pump resources (like pesticides and petrochemical fertilizers) into the soil to extract crops from it, and by side effects of industrialization (like perchlorate contamination of California's farmland from the leaky Kerr-McGee rocket-fuel factory in Nevada). The quality of the soil we are losing today is inferior to that of our parents and grandparents.

It would be both ironic and typical of our species if we exterminated ourselves by using up a resource that we held in contempt, used as a metaphor for worthlessness. Dirt is worth more than gold, because gold is optional, and dirt is not.

Where is the dirt going? To the oceans. Erosion by wind and water blow and wash much of it off the land. We extract nutrients from agricultural lands when we harvest and ship away the crops to market. Animals that feed off plants do so locally, and they defecate locally, thereby rebuilding the soil near the plants they feed upon. We, however, dump our sewage into the oceans, creating great rivers of soil nutrients that flow from agricultural lands to the bottom of the oceans, via our bodies.

As far as I know, there is little we can do to reverse the soil erosion that has already occurred. Dredging the oceans is impractical, given the amount of fossil fuels we have left, and would doubtless do incredible damage to ocean ecosystems that are already reeling from our unsustainable harvesting of fish, shellfish, and other ocean resources.

What we could conceivably do, though, is drastically reduce soil erosion. We would need to change our industrial practices. We would also need to eliminate poisons from our diet and environment to make our sewage fit to compost back into soil; that would have the added benefit of making us healthier. We would then need to overhaul our sewage management practices to return it to the agricultural lands as fertilizer. Taken together, these changes would help conserve the soil we have left.

Although we will not survive without these changes, none of it is profitable in a market economy, so we will not do it. There are powerful economic incentives for us to argue that it is too soon to tell whether soil loss is a serious enough problem, right up until it is too late to do anything about it. I am betting we will remain too self-involved and short-sighted to register the meaning of soil loss until most of it is gone. After, all, it is just dirt, right?

If we did, though, if by some miracle we made whatever changes are needed to make it possible for our society to value and act on stopping soil erosion, we could then build up the fertility of the soil we have left. A few older cultures were able to conserve and enrich even the faint scraps of soil on steep mountain slopes, farming the same thin soils successfully for centuries. The organic farming movement has helped us relearn old lessons about soil conservation and development. If we applied those practices, we could survive the loss of soil we have sustained to date, and eventually, over the centuries, we could slowly deepen our fertile soil beds, maybe even back to their pre-industrial levels.

We have already damaged the soil so deeply that we have left what will probably be a permanent record in the Earth's geology to show we were here and what we did. If we keep on as we have, our future is rocky. Literally. If we reverse our wasteful soil practices and spend the next few millennia deepening the soil, that too will be writ in the geological record. As a species, we still have time to leave behind us a life-promoting legacy, but we will have to change profoundly to want to do that. We will have to unite around this common goal as a species for millennia, something we have never done.

If we imagine uniting our species around a shared set of core values, if we imagine ten commandments in a sustainable worldwide culture, one of those ten will have to be something like this:

Protect the soil; it is your food, your body, and mother to us all.

When faced with essential but seemingly impossible tasks, I find wisdom in a bumper sticker, of all things, that I see all over Seattle: "Think globally. Act locally." Or as Gandhi said, we must be the change we want to see in the world. Lead by example. Learn about dirt, and slowly change your life by what you learn.

For my part, I have begun with composting, with building up the soil in my own gardens and yard. I also buy organic farm products whenever I can, because organic practices protect the soil more than conventional farming, and few actions we can take match the political impact of changing to whom we give our money; when we buy groceries we vote with our dollars. With the help of our friend Linda, we have begun growing some of our own fruits, vegetables, and herbs. These small steps are only a start, but they are something, and as I learn more about soil I will make more changes.

Dear Reader, let us aspire to become dirt-rich.

Sincerely yours,
Rick

Postscript: I am indebted to my uncle, Don Baldwin, for leading by example, for growing his own fruits and vegetables, for nurturing and improving the soil in his gardens year by year, and for showing me what a real cucumber is supposed to taste like. I had no idea what I was missing. Thank you, Uncle Don.

Sunday, January 23, 2005

I recently re-read Kaze no Tani no Naushika (www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/manga/nausicaa.html), translated into English as Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind, by Hayao Miyazaki. It is one of my favorite books, a vast manga (Japanese graphic novel).

Kaze no Tani no Naushika is set in the far future, when in the face of an environmental apocalypse the two largest remaining human kingdoms, the Torumekian Empire and the Dorok Principalities, embark on a self-destructive war over the little remaining habitable land. Our hero is Nausicaä, the daughter of the old king of The Valley of the Wind, a small border kingdom; she is an ecologist who studies the poisonous forests that have covered the Earth. She searches for a way for humanity to survive, but she is drawn reluctantly into the war when Torumekia commandeers her tiny kingdom's last flying gunship and her with it to fight the Doroks.

This only hints at the intricate plot, only the first few chapters of a massive, multi-volume epic, yet the elaborate weave of the plot stays true to a simple, moving, elegant story arc. Like some of my favorite stories, the true significance of the story is revealed in layers as the plot progresses; as more history is revealed, it changes our understanding of everything that has happened. The complex ecology, cultures, and politics eclipse even Frank Herbert's fine work on Dune, and setting the story on Earth gives it a far greater urgency and sting.

I find Kaze no Tani no Naushika more compelling than most science fiction. Miyazaki's dystopian future is the result not just of ecological collapse, but also worldwide nuclear war, both of which occur before our story with the ecological collapse nearing completion as we begin. Then he stirs into this mix venal and corrupt power politics to set the nihilistic wars for dwindling territory in motion. Astonishingly, though, Miyazaki pairs this dark setting and backstory with a bright protagonist who is brilliant, hopeful, earnest, and compassionate. Thus unlike so many dystopias, the tone of this story is not despair but serious hope, the search for morality and life amid war and death. Given our own bleak future and our need to find reason for hope, this combination moves me more than most science fiction stories I have read.

The huge cast of characters is as nuanced and morally sophisticated as in all Miyazaki's stories, yet this subtlety and complexity does not wash them out; the motivation, feelings, and beliefs of even the most minor characters are strong, believable, and deeply involving. Protagonists, antagonists, and background characters alike--Miyazaki draws out their personalities and feelings to make you understand and care about everyone. There is nothing generic about anyone in this story; everyone clearly comes from one of the many cultures he created for this world, yet none of them is a simple cliche rendering of that culture. Nausicaä herself is just a touch super-heroic, a skilled scientist, pilot, and warrior, but her youth, vulnerability, guilelessness, and compassion bring her back within reach, keep her human and keep us involved with her.

I was first introduced to an extremely abridged version of the story in the anime (Japanese animation) movie of the same name (www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/nausicaa/), which was one of the first anime movies I saw. I will always be grateful to my friend Danny Barer for introducing me to this and other anime films in the mid 1980s. In America Miyazaki is better known for his more recent films, such as Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away), Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke), and Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro).

Although I loved the anime from my first viewing of it, its story is so amputated in comparison with the manga that it is less like an adaptation and more like amputating a hand and keeping just the hand. This is not Miyazaki's fault, although both the manga and the anime are his work, aided by Studio Ghibli; adapting the entire story to film would require a movie at least twice as long as Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, perhaps much more. The nature of the conflict and especially the character of Princess Kushana are drastically different, though the setting, initial main characters, and backstory are the same. Like all Miyazaki films, it is visually lush, beautiful, and striking. Abbreviated though it is, I still love it as the closest we are ever likely to come to a film adaptation of the manga.

The black-and-white artwork of this book is gorgeous--crisp, clear, detailed, and supple. Miyazaki uses that clarity to conjure a fantastic world: jungles of enormous fungi, giant insects, armadas of flying ships, ceramic armor, swords, guns, and cannons, striking religious art and costume, convincing foreign script, vast fortresses and cities, swarms of refugees, cavalry clashing among ruins, dogfights between airships amid thunderstorms, children flying kites, old women telling stories, gardens, oases in a desert, windmills, greenhouse laboratories, flightless birds cooing over their eggs, and a fiercely loyal squirrel-fox. Every panel is packed with well-chosen, telling details that fill in Miyazaki's vision of the future, make it feel real and tangible. This is not a comic to be read quickly but studied; you must take the time to let the full impact of each panel be felt. Many of the panels are so beautiful they could be framed and hung on your wall.

The glory of the art is not just in its vivid illustration of setting and character, but in Miyazaki's exciting evocation of passion, movement, and energy. In so much art faces are mere masks, but Miyazaki makes the faces of every character radiate with humanity, move with hopes and worries, moods and thoughts. And physical movement itself is so well rendered--running, flying, leaping, fighting, climbing, falling--that before we know it we feel our hearts pounding and feel the kind of adrenaline we normally only associate with real life or at least moving pictures. Miyazaki even draws raw energy well--wind blowing, explosions, flares, sharp gunshots, low rumbles, sunlight through clouds, wood buckling under pressure, air currents, stench and miasma, cheers of soldiers rising up from towers, a tow cable snapping, the charge of giant insects crashing through city walls, plants sprouting before your eyes. All this passion, movement, and energy, from delicate to overwhelming, courses through the panels, infusing the beautiful static art with vitality. The story's rhythm balances that power with scenes of beauty and quiet contemplation, strengthening both by the contrast.

Miyazaki's work has always shown a surprisingly sophisticated appreciation of the subtle moral and ecological qualities of nature. I say surprising because humans, even the most ecologically-minded, usually flatten and mechanize nature when they try to describe or represent it. I make the same mistake, even though I know enough that I shouldn't, but we are poorly adapted to understanding organic systems and so tend to read the world in terms of objects and linear forces. We imagine the cosmos to be a mere machine, perhaps a relativistic one, perhaps a quantum one, but little more. By contrast, Miyazaki depicts nature's unexpectedly delicate weave of death within life, the total but subtle interdependence of seemingly independent individuals and species upon one another for even basic survival, and the sometimes shocking but life-affirming morality of living systems.

Dear Reader, I hope more of us learn to see the cosmos like that. It is our best hope for survival.

About Me

At work I am the executive director of the VISTA Expertise Network, a Paideia instructor, and a VISTA hardhat.
At home I am a student of philosophy and morality, a role-playing gamer, an avid hiker, a Rock Band enthusiast, a husband, and an uncle.